Week 1

February 24 – Introduction: France, Renaissance to Revolution

February 26 – How Place Makes Culture

 

Week 2 

March 2 – Monarchy and Kingdom around 1500: Where does Power Come From?

March 4 – Body Politics around 1500

tutorial – the french body politic

How did French society work around 1500? How did monarchy, aristocracy, clergy, and people interact? This week we explore the way the human body acted as a powerful metaphor for explaining politics, and we see how that metaphor both erected social boundaries and facilitated mobility. The optional extra readings anchor ideas of the body in the earthy and excremental, showing why the bowels were sometimes more important than the brain.

Readings:

• Claude de Seyssel, The Monarchy of France (1515), trans. J.H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), “Second Part,” 67-106.

• Nicole Hochner, “A Sixteenth-Century Manifesto for Social Mobility, or, the Body Politic Metaphor in Mutation” History of Political Thought 33:4 (2012): 607-26.

• Marc Bloch, “Introduction” and an excerpt of Chapter 1, “The beginnings of the touch for scrofula” in his The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J.E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 [1923]), 1-8, and 11-21.

• OPTIONAL EXTRAS:

• François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1990), chapters 1-13, 7-37, esp. chapters 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, and 13.

• Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993 [first published 1978]), chapters 1 & 2.

 

Week 3

March 9 – France’s Renaissance

March 11 – Global Interests in the Sixteenth Century

tutorial – the profits of lost worlds

Very early in the sixteenth century, France threw itself into the European race to explore and exploit the rest of the world. At the same time, the French were looking to Antiquity to explain their place in the world. Exploration of the world and of the past brought profits to France, both cultural and economic. This tutorial examines the interrelationship between these two kinds of exploration. In addition, it gives you a short excerpt from the popular novellas written by the king’s sister Marguerite to give you a sense of a woman’s perspective on the world of Renaissance France.

Readings:

• André Thevet, Excerpts from “Singularitez de la France antarctique,” in Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler, eds. and trans., André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View (Kingston-Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 3-26.

• Jotham Parsons, “The Logic of Economic Regulation,” in his Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France: Currency, Culture, and the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 60-103.

• Marguerite de Navarre, “Selections from the Heptaméron,” in Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp, ed. and trans., Marguerite de Navarre: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 371-87.

• OPTIONAL EXTRA:

If you are interested in a recent interpretation of Novella 4 (382-87) by a literary scholar, see Nancy Frelick, “Mirroring Discourses of Difference: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the Querelle des femmes” French Forum 42:3 (2017): 375-92.

 

Week 4

March 16 – Making French Cities Work: Artisans & Commerce

March 18 – Literacy & the Media Universe

tutorial – artisans, labour & knowledge

Last week we encountered the intellectual world of elites. This week we follow the work of urban artisans: people who laboured with their hands and built knowledge and value through skills. Our readings help us understand what French people began to call “useful knowledge” (savoirs utiles) – the kind of knowledge that supported industry, money-making, and science. Here is where we see the intersection of pre-industrial skill with capitalism, the forerunner of today’s “knowledge economy.”

Readings:

• Bernard Palissy, “Treatise on Metals and Alchemy,” in The Admirable Discourses of Bernard Palissy, trans. Aurèle La Rocque (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), 78-110.

• Pamela H. Smith and the Making and Knowing Project, “Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project” Art History 39:2 (2016): 210-33.

• Natalie Zemon Davis, “Printing and the People” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 189-226.

 

Week 5

March 23 – God Makes War: The Wars of Religion

March 25 – The Huguenot Diaspora

tutorial – justifying violence

France may qualify as the European epicenter of social disruption brought on by the Reformation. For almost a century, internecine conflict tore French society apart. In this week’s tutorial, we examine how that battle seeped into French culture: it allowed Protestant subjects to call into question the legitimacy of their Catholic king, and it produced new and horrific forms of violence amongst Christians. Our readings this week follow the way that historians have tried to interpret such abject behaviour.

Readings:

• François Hotman, Francogallia (1573), trans. J.H.M. Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Chapter VI (“Whether the kingdom of Francogallia was hereditary or elective, and the custom appropriate to the creation of kings”), 221-33 [odd pages only]; and Chapter VII (“The supreme power of the people in condemning and deposing kings for known cause”), 235-45 [odd pages only].

• Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 152-87.

• Natalie Zemon Davis, “Writing ‘The Rites of Violence’ and Afterward” Past and Present, Supplement 7 (2012): 8-29.

• Penny Roberts, “French Historians and Collective Violence” History and Theory 55 (2017): 60-75.

 

Week 6

March 30 – Monarchy & Kingdom around 1600: What does Toleration Mean?

April 1 – Humanity & Politics from Organism to Machine

tutorial – man & machine in the 17th century

Metaphors are powerful cultural tools. In the seventeenth century, as people saw complex machinery at work in their world (clocks, looms, mills), they began to think about the universe in new ways. This week, we confront the bodily metaphors we discussed in week 1with a new idea: the machine. Human bodies, social structures, and creation itself could be imagined as a clock or a robot. Here we can ask ourselves how to trace the origins of the way we conceptualize our bodies and our universe in the 21st century.

Readings:

• Carol Collier, “The Body-Machine: Descartes” in her Recovering the Body: A Philosophical Story (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013), 133-66.

• Jessica Riskin, “Descartes among the Machines,” in her The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 44-76, with notes on 392-402.

• Otto Mayr, Chapter 4 “The Clockwork State,” and Chapter 5 “The Authoritarian Conception of Order,” in his Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 102-21.

 

Week 7

April 6 –The Ideology of Absolute Royal Power

April 8 – Culture as a Tool of State

tutorial – sophistication as discipline

After the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the revolts of the early seventeenth, the French crown needed to devise a fresh strategy to control the elites who most threatened the monarchy. That strategy involved slowly transforming the French aristocrats from a warrior elite to a cultured elite. By stressing the importance of courtesy, civility, sophistication, and courtliness, the monarchy used soft power as a form of control. These forms of French civility spread through the world as a marker of social distinction and remain with us today in our language, gestures, and social expectations.

Readings:

• Orest Ranum, “Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State, 1630-1660” Journal of Modern History 52:3 (1980): 426-51.

• Georges Vigarello, “The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility” in Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part 2 (New York: Zone, 1990), 148-99.

• Kate van Orden, Chapter 5, “Pyrrhic Dance and the Art of War,” in her Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 187-234.

 

MID-SEMESTER BREAK

April 13 – no lectures

April 15 – no lectures

 

Week 8 

April 20 – Consumer Economies, I: Publics and Ideas

April 22 – Consumer Economies, II: Fabrics and Clothing

tutorial – capitalism & consumption

We begin with a link to last week’s topic about sophistication: advise on making good conversation by one of the century’s masters: Madeleine de Scudéry, who embodies the way that women cultivated urban intellectual environments in the age of Louis XIV. We also examine the way that consumerist marketplaces began to explode as the means of expressing sophistication proliferated: through knowledge & reading, buying & displaying, and wearing the latest fashions.

Readings:

• Madeleine de Scudéry, “Conversations on Diverse Subjects (1680)” in Jane Donawerth and Julie Strongson, eds. and trans., Madeleine de Scudéry, Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 96-105.

• Robert Darnton, “The Forbidden Bestsellers of Prerevolutionary France” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 4:1 (1989): 17-45.

• Michael Kwass, “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France” American Historical Review 111:3 (2006): 631-59.

 

Week 9

April 27 – Consumer Economies, III: Drugs – Smoking & Drinking

April 29 – Monarchy & Kingdom around 1700: Darkening Court / Enlightening City?

tutorial – enlightenment & inequality

The intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment was in part about creating a pluralistic world in which people could assess, discuss, and select optimal ways of learning about the world. It was also a period in which Europeans began seriously to interrogate their place in the globe. Some of them argued that they were the most advanced and successful culture in the world, while other voices began to ask cutting questions about how European successes were also at the cost of others. This week, we focus on the question of inequality and how our current debates about the costs of global capitalism were in development in this period.

Readings:

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, with Related Documents. Helena Rosenblatt, trans. and ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), Part 2, 70-95.

• Michael Kwass, Chapter 1, “The Globalization of European Consumption,” in his Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 15-40, with notes on 372-80.

• Joseph Roach, “Body of Law: The Sun King and the Code Noir,” in Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 113-31.

 

Week 10 : RESEARCH WEEK

May 4 – no lectures: Research Week for Essay - Consultations

May 6 – no lectures: Research Week for Essay - Consultations

 

Week 11

May 11 – What Brought the French Revolution? Cultures, Industries, Politics

May 13 – Making Global Revolutions, 1776-91

tutorial – utopias & corruption

In Voltaire’s most famous work, the novel Candide (1759), we encounter the land of “El Dorado,” a place of incredible (colonial) wealth. The road that led to the French Revolution crossed many intersecting paths: problems of local and global exploitation, governmental corruption, and ideas of human inequality. This week we examine the parallel worlds of Candide’s optimism and the roiling discontent of the oppressed.

Readings:

• Voltaire, Candide, 2nd edition [Norton Critical Edition]. Ed. and Trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), text of the novel on 1-75.

• Vincent Brown, “A Vapor of Dread: Observations on Racial Terror and Vengeance in the Age of Revolution,” in Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 175-98.

 

Week 12

May 18 – 1789: Events & Consequences

May 20 – Permanent Revolution & the Terror

tutorial – terror & modernity

What did the concept of ‘revolution’ achieve as a mode of politics? If you overthrow a form of government that threatens eventually to return, how can the revolution ever end? We look at the way that the Revolution led to the horrific period known as the Terror. The grisly invention of the Guillotine was designed to sever the head of the old body politic. To build a new form of politics, revolution has never stopped returning, and that reality is a key feature of post-1789 global society.

Readings:

• Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee, eds., The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2002), Section 3: “Creating a regenerated France,” 24-34, and Section 13: “The Terror at Work,” 103-13.

• Sophie Wahnich, “Introduction” and “Conclusion” in her In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (London: Verso, 2015), 1-20 and 97-108.

• Lela Graybill, “The Guillotine in Perspective,” in her The Visual Culture of Violence After the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2016), 25-62.

 

Week 13

May 25 – How do You Solve a Problem Like Napoléon?

May 27 – Conclusion: Revolutionary Empire – France around 1800

tutorial – legacies: the french body politic

How did the Revolution lead to Empire? And how did the legacies of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” settle into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries? This week, we take stock of the afterlife of Revolutionary politics and the way that it included and excluded different people from political life across the world.

Readings:

• Donald M.G. Sutherland, Chapter 11 “Napoleon and Thirty Million Frenchmen” in his The French Revolution and Empire: the Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 326-55.

• Lynn Hunt, Chapter 2 “Modernity and History” in her Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 47-91.

• Joan Wallach Scott, “Political Emancipation” in her Sex and Secularism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 89-121, with notes on 198-202.